By Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today

This reflection departs from the field and the factory floor, yet its roots run deep in the same soil. In this instalment of Potato Soup for the Farmer’s Soul, Lukie Pieterse recalls a moment from his youth that shaped his lifelong view of empathy, humility, and gratitude. Though the story begins far from a potato field, its quiet truth — that life, given even a little light, will reach toward it — remains one every farmer knows by heart.

I was barely twenty, a university student then, still full of theories about social work and what it meant to “help.” This story isn’t about potatoes, or farming, or any of the things that filled my days since then — at least not directly. It’s a personal reflection, one that has stayed with me for nearly half a century. Yet in its own quiet way, it carries the same lessons the land keeps teaching us: patience, humility, and the fragile beauty of life reaching for light.

We were a group of eager social work students visiting a residential facility for children with severe physical and mental disabilities. The place smelled faintly of disinfectant and despair. The walls were clean but bare, the windows sealed tight. In one of the wards, rows of small cots held children who seemed to belong to another world — thin arms, twisted legs, vacant gazes. Some made soft, involuntary sounds; others lay motionless, caught in a stillness too deep for words.

I had prepared myself for sadness, or so I thought. But what I encountered was beyond sadness — it was a silence so complete it pressed against the ribs.

At one point we were asked to help take a few of the children into a nearby “sun room,” a place the staff said they loved. It was an ordinary, empty space filled with light — nothing more — but for these children it was the closest thing to joy the day could offer.

That was when I saw her.

She was tiny, perhaps nine or ten years old, though her frail little frame made her look younger. Her limbs were wiry, her hands small and knotted like the hands of an old woman. Her little face was narrow, the bones showing beneath skin that seemed too thin for this world. I was told she was deaf, blind, and mute — a child without access to sound, sight, or speech. Yet when we entered the sunlit room, something extraordinary happened.

She paused just inside the doorway, as if sensing a change in the air. Then, lifting her face toward the warm sunlight, she tilted her head back. Her mouth opened in a wide, unguarded smile. She raised both arms — slender, trembling arms — and turned her palms upward as if to receive a blessing, or offering an unspoken prayer of gratitude for the moment, perhaps. The sunlight fell across her face and hands and frail body, and she stood motionless, utterly still, drinking it in.

For a long moment she seemed almost radiant — a small, broken human vessel filled with something immense. Around her, the world was silent, yet she glowed with a joy I have rarely seen in any other human being.

That vision branded itself into me. It felt unbearable then; I had to turn away, pretending to busy myself with another task. But I watched her from the corner of my eye, and when we left that room, I carried her with me — the way one carries a question that never quite lets go.

In the years since, that memory has returned at unexpected times — when I’ve felt wronged, or when life seemed unfair, or when the noise of self-pity grew too loud. I’ve seen her again in my mind, standing in that square of light, her face lifted to a sun she could not see, only feel and experience with unfiltered joy.

And every time, the message is the same: joy or happiness is not a privilege of circumstance. It is a grace that finds its own way in.

I often wonder what became of her. Whether she grew to adulthood, or whether her small flame was extinguished early, as so many of those children’s lives in that institution were. The sad truth is, I will never know. But in a strange way, she has lived on — not as a ghost, but as a quiet teacher in my mind. She showed me that beauty can inhabit even the most wounded forms of life, and that gratitude can exist without any big and lofty reason.

Nearly fifty years later, I am an older man of course, perhaps a little wiser, certainly more aware of my own fragility. I’ve seen the world and humanity’s cruelties play out in far larger arenas — famine, war, greed and more. Yet the image that humbles me most is still that of a little girl, blind to the world, smiling into the sunlight she could not see, holding her hands open to receive what she could never name.

She reminded me — and keeps reminding me still — that to be alive, even briefly, is a miracle. And to fully feel that life, experience it even in darkness, is the purest act of faith there is.

Epilogue – The Human Sunlight

As I’ve grown older, that day and that experience have come to mean more to me than sorrow or pity ever could. What I witnessed in that child was not tragedy alone — it was transcendence. She stood as proof that the human spirit, even when stripped of everything we think gives life its meaning, still reaches toward warmth. It still hungers for connection, for light.

In her frail body, joy had found a place to dwell. Not because her life was easy or fair — it was neither — but because something inside her still recognized the gift of the sun on her skin. That recognition, silent and wordless, has become a compass for me. Whenever I’m tempted to close myself off, to withdraw into complaint or fatigue, I think of her. I think of how she met life unquestioningly with open hands, and an open heart.

Over the years, I’ve come to see that most of us live behind thicker walls than hers. We have sight and sound and so much more, yet so often we fail to see or hear what truly matters. We chase comfort, security, approval, and a bunch of other senseless material things — all the while forgetting that gratitude can arrive as quietly and radiantly as sunlight on the face of a child who cannot ever see it or name it.

That afternoon didn’t make me a better man or for that matter a better human being. But it planted something enduring — a reverence for small mercies, for the fragile holiness of simply being. I think that’s what living means, in the deepest sense: to always remain open enough to be astonished throughout our life.

That hapless little girl has long since vanished from this world, I imagine, but not from mine. In some unspoken way, she still stands there in the light, reminding me that compassion is not grand, not loud, not heroic. It is the simple act of staying awake to the presence of another’s soul — even, and especially, when that soul is fragile beyond words.

In the years since, I’ve often thought that farming, too, is an act of faith much like that child’s face lifted to the sun — we tend what we cannot fully see, trusting that warmth will come. Every potato pushing through the dark soil, straining toward daylight, feels to me like an echo of her — a small, but steadfast insistence on life. That moment in the sun taught me something I later found in the furrows of a field: even the humblest life, given a little light, will rise toward it with everything it has.

If I have carried any lesson from that day, it is this: we cannot mend every wound or lift every sorrow. But we can choose, again and again, to be bearers of light for each other — however faint, however fleeting — as long as it’s sincere. And sometimes, that small light is what keeps the world from going dark. Sometimes, that is the best we can offer each other in this imperfect existence.